I watched The Discovery Channel’s The Flight That Fought Back last night. The story is obviously well known. I know the names of all of those people as though they were friends of mine. Jeremy Glick. Todd Beamer. Mark Bingham. Sandy Bradshaw. CeeCee Lyles. Louis Nacke. Tom Burnett.
If you get a chance to see this program … I honestly can’t recommend it highly enough. I really can’t speak about it with any eloquence – all I can say is: you’ve got to see it.
Flight 93
I watched the Discovery Channel’s The Flight That Fought Back last evening. It was quite riveting, but did it strike anybody else as odd that Todd Beamer was barely mentioned at all? (I recollect only hearing his name once and…
Jean and I watched that also. It was incredible. I just sat there saying holy shit, holy shit.
I felt the same way. Holy shit.
The Flight that Fought Back
Last night I saw on the Discovery Channel the premiere of The Flight that Fought Back, the new documentary about the heroes of United Flight 93, the average citizens who won the first battle in the war on terror, showing
I saw it.
You want the ending to be different, no matter what actually happened. You want a happy ending where they drag the terrorists out of the cockpit, beat them to death, then the old guy lands the plane safely.
Yes, Bill! I felt the same way. I watched it – knowing the whole story, and knowing the end – but not wanting, somehow, to fully believe it.
I loved that they put up such a damn good fight. That they worked together. That they took a vote. That they congealed as a team. It just … represents the best that humanity has to offer.
It just … represents the best that humanity has to offer.
I always saw it as a representation of the average American. I’ve never doubted that something similar would have happened on the other three planes, had they been tipped off in a similar fashion.
Were it attempted again, somehow, I doubt any but a tiny minority wouldn’t act the same.
I believe that too, Lion. They had more information than the folks on the other planes … they knew they had to act, and they did. I’m sure the people on the other planes would have done the same.
They may have been average, whatever, but their behavior in that moment – as a group – was far from average. The best that humanity has to offer.
Doesn’t matter if they themselves are average people, Lion. Sometimes average people (I’m thinking of Anne Frank, or Rosa Parks … just your basic people, caught up in an extraordinary moment in time) rise above the moment – and become symbolic of who we want to be, how we hope we would behave if we were in similar circumstances.
Fair enough. I guess I’m seeing it through my own perspective, in which action of that sort is a foregone conclusion.
“They may have been average, whatever, but their behavior in that moment – as a group – was far from average.”
I believe it was said by Admiral Nimitz after Iwo Jima, but it was just as true for Flight 93: “uncommon valor was a common virtue.” What more can anyone say? Words of sorrow and gratitude alike seem woefully insufficient.
It feels selfish to speculate, but I do sometimes wonder, if the timeline had been reversed, and the attacks on DC had hit first (without giving that group of passengers knowledge of what had already happened at the WTC), if I’d even be here. I’d flown down to DC from Boston the Saturday before–seeing the Towers from the air over NYC on the way, and not imagining for a second that I never would again–I’d been on the Hill that Monday and expected to be there again on Tuesday. I feel a kind of personal gratitude toward the passengers of Flight 93, and I truly don’t know how to say “thank you” to them enough.
If I were put in such a situation, I’d like to think I would act the same way–I think most of us would hope to–but who knows?